Smirnoff
Bringing design innovation to product sales.
Context
Launching any product is always challenging, even for a century-old brand. Introducing Smirnoff ICE was even more difficult as it was the brand’s first expansion into the malt beverage space and smaller emerging markets. The brand wanted to use the opportunity to launch the brand as a way to galvanize local sales teams across distributorships.
Challenge
The biggest challenge was bringing innovation to the local sales process being used by distributor teams, as each had its own systems and tools. This meant a new set of sales tools, assets, and pitch processes needed to be developed, produced, and distributed efficiently since the brand would drop new products into markets each quarter. Ultimately, a traditional presentation and call with the team wasn’t going to cut it if the brand was going to reach its target of 3 million cases in its first year.
Result
The result was the development of a product drop kit containing product-specific content assets that standardized and streamlined the sales tool kit to be used by local market teams. The kits specifically featured:
- Branded content sales pitch videos (see clip above) that teams used in sales outreach with local in-market retailers. The videos were created to also serve as content as promotional material at local launch activations.
- Educational Interactive brand launch guides that teams used to accelerate team and retailer onboarding.
- Customizable sales tool templates and one-sheets for local in-market team use.
The results of this effort helped propel the brand to surpass 5MM cases in first-year sales, marking one of Smirnoff’s more successful product launches into a new category.
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